I have tried searching online, but I could not find any relevant answer to this question. If a similar question has already been asked or if the answer to it is present in the FAQ, then I apologize in advance.
I would like to self-host my own instance, and I saw that you needed a licence for that. I have a Premium subscription with Bitwarden, so that should work, but I was wondering how it worked for multiple users.
Let’s say I have my own instance running locally with the licence of my premium account. Can other users store their passwords on my local server without me having to buy an Organization or Family plan?
Basically, I don’t need some kind of shared vault for my users like in family or organization plan, I just want to know if it is possible to have multiple users store their passwords on my instance with only one global Premium licence (mine).
Hi, thank you for your comment.
When you mean “multiple users storing credentials in a self-hosted organization requires a licence”, do you mean one licence per instance or per user and what type of licence would work?
Would a single Premium licence work to set up an instance for as many users as I would like, or do I need to upgrade?
You don’t need a license at all to self-host Bitwarden (see bottom of this page):
All users on a self-hosted server get “free” accounts, i.e. the same ones as they would get with free cloud accounts on bitwarden.com (missing Premium features like TOTP).
If you have an individual Premium subscription, you can use it on your self-hosted instance for your account while all other users stay “free”. Of course, they can also upgrade to Premium individually.
It is also possible to buy a Family Organization license instead and use it on your self-hosted server to enable Premium for up to 6 accounts, but this is not required if you don’t want or need it.
There is one difference: With bitwarden.com cloud accounts, you also get a free Organization where 2 users are able to share up to 2 password collections. This is not available for self-hosted instances, so if you want to share passwords, a payed license for an Organization is required.
You don’t need a license at all to self-host Bitwarden (see bottom of this page):
Indeed, it seems like no licence is required for basic hosting based on what is written in the table. I remember checking this table, but I must have been confused along the way after reading some documentation elsewhere and ended up believing a licence was needed for hosting.
My bad… I guess I just hallucinated false information…
But based on what you said, this makes much more sense now. Thank you for the clarification!